Journalist Joins His Jailer’s Side in a Bizarre Persian Gulf Feud

Mr. Fahmy, no longer a neutral bystander, has become a pawn exploited and abused by both sides.

The intra-gulf rivalry erupted into open hostility last month as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt severed all trade, travel and diplomatic ties with Qatar, accusing it of using Al Jazeera broadcasts and financial support to promote Islamist extremism and interfere in the affairs of its neighbors. Qatar disputed those allegations and said its own internal affairs had become the targets of Saudi and Emirati meddling.

Mr. Fahmy, 43, has eagerly joined in, holding a recent news conference in Washington to add his voice to Saudi and Emirati accusations that Qatar and Al Jazeera conspire with Islamist extremists. “Qatar has been given so many chances, and they have been warned so many times,” he said, commending the Saudi and Emirati blockade.

Asked at the news conference if he had consulted Saudi or Emirati officials, or if he was close to the Emirati ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, Mr. Fahmy said, falsely, “To simply answer your question, no.” (Mr. Fahmy said this past week that he was protecting a friend.)

Mr. Fahmy, an Egyptian-Canadian, now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He acknowledged in a recent telephone interview that he had received what he described as a “loan” from Mr. Otaiba to finance the legal action against Qatar. The ambassador had been a friend since they attended high school together in Egypt, at the Cairo American College, and he was one of several people asked for financial support, Mr. Fahmy said.

He insisted that the money for the lawsuit had gone to a third party, whom Mr. Fahmy refused to name. “I have not received a penny from Yousef,” he said.

But he dismissed many of the other claims raised by investigators who conducted the surveillance against him. He called the assertions in their resulting report “absurd,” saying they were “fabrications” by Al Jazeera and Qatar in “a systematic campaign to smear my reputation.”

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The journalists Peter Greste, left, Mr. Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, right, during their trial in 2014. Mr. Fahmy was in jail for more than a year, accused of stirring up unrest as an agent of his employer’s owner, the Qatari government.Credit Khaled Desouki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The investigation raised far-fetched allegations that Mr. Fahmy had worked covertly for nearly two decades as a spy for Italy, beginning when he was still a full-time college student in Vancouver. The report included many handwritten observations, presented as originating with Israeli intelligence, that describe dozens of sightings of Mr. Fahmy in Rome and at Italian diplomatic facilities in Paris, Cairo and Morocco.

But in an interview this past week, Mr. Fahmy said he had never been to Italy or Morocco, nor to the other Italian diplomatic facilities mentioned in the report. For several of the dates in question, he provided detailed evidence that he had been far from the alleged meeting locations.

The investigative report — hundreds of pages in length — was provided to The New York Times and other journalists by intermediaries sympathetic to Qatar in an apparent attempt to discredit Mr. Fahmy. The name of the client who commissioned the research was deleted from the copy provided to The Times. But the report indicates that the anonymous client had given the investigators a copy of Mr. Fahmy’s Canadian passport and already had a “comprehensive knowledge of the subject and his activities,” as a former employer might.

The report is also the latest in a series of cases when emails from Mr. Otaiba’s account have appeared in leaks embarrassing the United Arab Emirates and benefiting Qatar. All are widely believed to be the work of hackers working for Qatar.

A spokesman for the government of Qatar said it had no knowledge of any investigation of Mr. Fahmy, and a representative of the Emirati Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Fahmy worked for a few months in 2007 as a freelance reporter for the Cairo bureau of The Times. He went on to work as a reporter and producer for CNN, where he helped cover the Arab Spring revolts of 2011 in Egypt and Libya.

Al Jazeera was known in Egypt for its sympathetic coverage of Mohamed Morsi, the ousted Egyptian president, and his political faction, the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt’s Emirati-backed military government, which removed Mr. Morsi from power in July 2013, considered Al Jazeera a tool of Qatar and the Brotherhood, and Egyptian security forces had already raided the offices of Al Jazeera’s Arabic language channels before the network hired Mr. Fahmy, in September 2013.

Mr. Fahmy, a nominal Muslim who drank alcohol and seldom prayed, personally opposed the Brotherhood and cheered for the military takeover, he told friends at the time.

But Al Jazeera offered him a job as the Cairo bureau chief for its English-language arm, which was less conspicuously supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood than its Arabic-language counterparts. Mr. Fahmy later wrote in a memoir that he had been convinced that Al Jazeera would maintain, and the Egyptian government would accept, a bright-line distinction between the sister Arabic and English networks. His lawsuit centers on claims that Al Jazeera broke promises to uphold that separation and to secure a proper Egyptian broadcasting license.

The Egyptian police arrested Mr. Fahmy and two colleagues in Cairo in December 2013 on charges that they had conspired with the Muslim Brotherhood to broadcast false reports of unrest in Egypt. (Prosecutors never presented any evidence to support the charges.)

Former fellow inmates say Mr. Fahmy started talking avidly of suing Al Jazeera almost as soon as he was arrested. He soon also echoed the claims of the Egyptian government and its Emirati patrons that Al Jazeera had been conspiring with the Brotherhood and promoting dangerous extremism. He initiated his lawsuit against Al Jazeera in a Canadian court in May 2015, before he was released from jail in September of that year.

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The newsroom at the headquarters of the Al Jazeera English-language channel in Doha, Qatar.Credit Fadi Al-Assaad/Reuters

His fellow prisoners said the lawsuit appeared motivated in part by a desire for a big payoff from Qatar and was in part a strategy to win over the Egyptian authorities.

After his release, Mr. Fahmy also began corresponding with Mr. Otaiba. When Mr. Fahmy gave a news conference in Cairo in May 2015, for example, Mr. Otaiba emailed an offer to arrange coverage by the Emirati-linked news network SkyNews Arabia.

“SkyNews to take it live would be awesome, I think a nudge to their C.E.O. could make it happen,” Mr. Fahmy wrote back.

After the news conference, Mr. Fahmy wrote to the ambassador, “I plan to keep the pressure on through the media,” and he alluded to documents from the Qatari opposition that would “embarrass the government.”

He asked for money, too. “I am looking for a personal loan with a written agreement to pay back on success plus interest, and or a profit margin,” Mr. Fahmy wrote in the same email.

His appeal seems to have worked. That October, Mr. Otaiba emailed an Egyptian businessman, Tawfik Diab, a relative, to arrange a transfer of $ 250,000 to an account under Mr. Fahmy’s name at the Royal Bank of Canada in Montreal. (Mr. Fahmy said in the interview that the Montreal account had belonged to the unnamed third party and that he had been unaware until now of Mr. Diab’s involvement.)

A few days later, Mr. Fahmy confirmed the transaction. “The money is in,” he wrote, and he promised “a progress report that we were planning to send to AD” — presumably Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. “My team here will start working on the media blitz to revive the case in U.S. media,” he added.

The next May, in 2016, Mr. Fahmy emailed information about his personal checking account, in Vancouver, to Mr. Otaiba. But it is unclear how Mr. Otaiba responded. Mr. Fahmy said in the interview that there had been no payment, and he provided corroborating bank statements.

The investigation into Mr. Fahmy began in late November, according to a footnote to the report. The investigators obtained telephone bills, call lists, credit reports, court records, electronic communications, and photographs of Mr. Fahmy’s residences and workplaces. They also compiled a list of places where his wife likes to shop.

A second report by the same investigators mixed in the handwritten notes, allegedly compiled by Israeli intelligence, claiming that Mr. Fahmy had worked as a spy for Italy since as early as 1997. Other handwritten documents, also unconfirmed, purport to indicate a secret account in his name in the Vatican Bank.

Mr. Fahmy called the report defamation and said he would add it to his lawsuit. There is no turning back, he said. “I am in too deep now.”